Kipling's Bear
"Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," Rudyard Kipling wrote in 1889. But of course they have met myriad times and Kipling, though often misquoted, knew it welclass="underline" "But there is neither East nor West. . . . When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth!" (Kipling 1925: 231). By focusing on relations between the First World and the Third, post- colonial studies have too literally followed the initial line of Kipling's
Ballad and missed its deconstructive flow. However, in the Great Game between the British and Russian Empires, which Kipling explored in Kim, three rather than two elements fight a sort of militarized dialectics: England, India, and, in the background, vicious Russia. The Game pushed India to the west and Russia to the east, a complex geopolitics that Kipling situated in the continuum that spans and curves around the globe. An Irish boy and British spy in India, Kim works against the Russian penetration there in a spirit that is more reminiscent of the future Cold War rather than of India's struggle.
In a later poem, "Truce of the Bear" (1898), Kipling presented a pathetic beggar who tells the story of his fight with a horrible beast, "the Bear that stands like a Man." The fight, if there was any, took place 50 years earlier than the story, but the beggar keeps repeating it as the central event of his life. He describes the bear as "the
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Figure 1: Joseph Swain, "Save me from my friends!" 1878: The Ameer of Afghanistan between the Russian bear and the British Lion. Source: "Punch, or the London Charivari", November 30, 1878
monstrous, pleading thing." However, the bear is not unknown; the opposite is true: "I knew his times and his seasons, as he knew mine. . . .I knew his strength and cunning, as he knew mine." When he met this bear 50 years earlier, the hunter had pity on him and did not shoot. In response, the bear ripped his face away. Now, the former hunter asks for money in exchange for demonstrating his wounds. "Over and over the story, ending as he began: / 'There is no truce with Adam-zad, the Bear that looks like a Man!' " Though Russia is not mentioned in the poem, generations of readers have perceived this bear as the symbol of Russia, and the poem as a call to Britain to make no truce with this rival. In 1919, an author of the Atlantic Magazine praised Kipling for his "remarkable rightness." After the revolution in Russia, the wartime alliance seemed to her like a bad idea, a Truce of the Bear. To this author, "the Russians were behaving very much, and very vividly, like 'the bear that looks like a man.' " She testified to the fact that Kipling's Russophobia was unpopular before and during the war: "The intellectuals have been Russianizing themselves, in these last years; and Kipling's laughter at that phenomenon must have been unholy. They could scarcely afford to feel him remarkably right, it would prove them so remarkably wrong" (Gerould 1919).
But Kipling's construction is more subtle. While Matun, the narrator, "Eyeless, noseless, and lipless - toothless, broken of speech," does not look like a Man, Adam-zad, the bear, "Horrible, hairy, human, with paws like hands in prayer," does. This resemblance between the Bear and the Man repeats as the central line of the poem; they are like twins who are engaged in an eternal, open-ended fight. Once again, we need to return to the very start of the poem to realize that the narrator is not white; he is bandaged. "[H]e follows our white men in / Matun, the old blind beggar, bandaged from brow to chin" (Kipling 1925: 271-3). The duel and the truce were struck between the Indian man and the Russian bear. As in Kim, the construction is triangular, not linear. Like Gogol's "The Nose," this poem turns into doubles what cannot possibly be similar: the whole and the part, the man and the beast, "less than one and double."
Throughout the age of empires, Britain increasingly saw its adversary in Russia. In the time of Kipling, both empires debated the possibility of a Russian attack on India, which was alternatively perceived as revenge for the defeat in the Crimea and as a threat to British rule in Asia. First used by the Brits in 1840, the term "Great Game" referred to their civilizing mission in Central Asia, but the meaning shifted to the zero-sum game when Russia expanded into the region (Yapp 1987; Hopkirk 1996). In 1879, a certain A. Dekhnewallah published a pamphlet, The Great Russian Invasion of India, which described a future war between the two empires. Advancing through Afghanistan, Russian troops occupy the Punjab and Central provinces. Their attack is well prepared by the numerous spies who provoke mutiny among lower castes. British India is saved by an artillery officer, "a quiet man with large dreamy eyes," who withdraws the troops to Kashmir and organizes cunning attacks on the invaders. Finally, the British send navy expeditions into the Black Sea and the Baltic, forcing the Russians to purchase peace at the expense of giving up Afghanistan and Persia (Dekhnewallah 1879: 43, 66). The war of the future was imagined by analogy with the war of the past, the Crimean campaign.
"The Russian is a delightful person till he tucks his shirt in," stated Kipling in the amazing story, "The Man Who Was" (1889). A British regiment in north India hosts a certain Dirkovitch, "a Russian of the Russians, as he said." A Cossack officer and a journalist writing for a newspaper "with a name that was never twice the same," Dirkovitch is evidently a spy. But the Brits treat him with respect: he has done "rough work in Central Asia" and has seen more "help-yourself fighting than most men of his years." With his bad English, this Cossack tries to refresh the idea of the civilizing mission for the White Hussars:
He remained distressingly European through it all. . . . He would unburden himself by the hour on the glorious future that awaited the combined arms of England and Russia when . . . the great mission of civilizing Asia should begin. That was unsatisfactory, because Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia, and she is too old. You cannot reform a lady of many lovers. (Kipling 1952: 29)
Denying the orientals' ability to rule themselves as Brits do, the narrator, one of the White Hussars, holds no illusions about the Russian's sincerity: Dirkovitch knew the hopelessness of changing Asia "as well as any one else." The White Guards recognize this Russian in a racial way that is meaningful for them; although an Indian officer, their ally, cannot not join them at table and knows it, Dirkovitch is able to spend his evenings with the Brits; moreover, he proves his ability to drink more brandy than any of them. But suddenly, a weird figure appears in the living room: The Man Who Was, a miserable Afghan who speaks English and Russian. He turns out to be a former officer of this very regiment, whom the Russians captured in the Crimea and sent to Siberia; decades later, beaten and pathetic, he has found his way back to his regiment, "like a homing pigeon." He cringes before the Cossack who espouses an unclear threat: "He was just one little - oh, so little - accident, that no one remembered. Now he is That. So will you be, brother-soldiers so brave - so will you. But you will never come back." The Man Who Was dies three days later. As Dirkovitch departs, the smartest of his British friends murmurs, "A terrible spree there's sure to be when he comes back again." The theme of coming back is central for the story. British troops in India were expecting the return of the experience of the Crimean War. Having read the story to the end, we inevitably go back to the beginning: